Forum - Tips & Tricks - (Stupid) Question - Messages http://www.muvizu.com/Forum/topic1415-stupid-question.aspx Forum - Tips & Tricks - (Stupid) Question - Messages en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Jitbit AspNetForum Fri, 23 Mar 2012 04:19:38 GMT Fri, 23 Mar 2012 04:19:38 GMT http://www.muvizu.com/Forum/topic1415-stupid-question.aspx Message from bigwally ziggy72 wrote:
Hi Ericksone. Unfortunately, Muvizu doesn't do the whole text-to-speech thing automatically, but you can use programs like Text To Speech Maker :
http://www.xrlly.com/text-to-speech.htm



Fortunately?]]> Fri, 23 Mar 2012 04:19:38 GMT http://www.muvizu.com/Forum/topic1415-stupid-question.aspx Message from Luscan
Sorry to hear that you're having trouble with Muvizu. If you're having trouble getting Muvizu to render out pictures as well as sound then it might be your Codecs that are giving you troubles. Could you download the K-Lite codec pack (http://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm) and give rendering out your video another try?

Whilst Muvizu doesn't support text to speech it's possible to record audio directly into Muvizu using the Prepare Dialogue window which can be found under the Prepare menu heading.

Animating in Muvizu is done in roughly four stages.

The first thing you need to do (other than have an idea of what you want to make) is create a set and your characters. You can do this through the Create menu - there's a lot of options available to you here including different kinds of lights, hundreds of different props and characters. Once you've created everything that you think you're going to use you can right click the thing you've made and it'll bring up the Properties menu for that thing - this'll allow you to customise everything you've got. There are a lot of options available to you here and it might seem a little overwhelming at first and the best piece of advice I can give is either ask on here for help or play around with things to see what's right for you.

Once you've got everything you want to use you need to prepare your animation. You do this through the Prepare menu function - Prepare audio is good for putting in background music and sound effects. Dialogue allows you to load a second audio track into Muvizu that'll function as speech for your characters. Camera movement lets you set up how you want the camera that's going to record the movie to move (do you want it to be able to move fast or keep it slow? want it to be able to spin around really fast? that sort of thing).

The real meat of the prepare menu though comes from Prepare Character Actions. This brings up a window that lets you customise what animations you want your characters to play so that when you're Directing you know what's going to happen and when. You can preview the animations in this view too so you can start to get a feel for what's right for your story. Once you've got everything ready to go you have to direct it all.

Directing in Muvizu is done in passes which means you don't have to do everything at once. This makes everything a lot less stressful because you can take your time over things. The different menus in Direct should be pretty self explanatory. Open up the menu you want (like if you want to have your characters walk around open Direct Character Movement) and you'll see that you've got a long bar at the bottom of the screen. There's a little movie clapper-board icon in the bottom left. Click that to start recording. Once you're recording you'll can make use of your carefully prepared actions and stuff. You can use the Timeline (which is listed under Tools) to shuffle around actions and get things timed so even if you don't get things quite right after the first try you can get them right later.

Once you've done all this and you've got a movie that you're happy with simply go to Video and click Make Movie. You can click 'Options' and give it the settings that you want (resolution, if you want the video to have anti-aliasing or not) and then click Make Video... From there you can upload the video to YouTube through Muvizu to show it off to the world!]]> Thu, 24 Nov 2011 12:24:02 GMT http://www.muvizu.com/Forum/topic1415-stupid-question.aspx Message from Ericksone Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:54:05 GMT http://www.muvizu.com/Forum/topic1415-stupid-question.aspx Message from Ericksone It seems like it takes forever just to make a quick video on here. Even just getting used to the controls is tough for some reason, maybe cause I am on a laptop? I have tried watching the tutorials and they help but it still seems to confusing. Do you have any advice or ideas that will help me make this software work for me? Thanks in advance for any help!!!!]]> Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:29:51 GMT http://www.muvizu.com/Forum/topic1415-stupid-question.aspx Message from ziggy72 http://www.xrlly.com/text-to-speech.htm

This is a trial version that only does the first 300 characters you type, but it's pretty good. Audacity is reckoned to be a good free audio editor, although I use Goldwave myself (not free!). There's a thread somewhere on the forum about good free programs, but I hope that helps a bit.]]> Wed, 16 Nov 2011 21:47:14 GMT http://www.muvizu.com/Forum/topic1415-stupid-question.aspx Message from Ericksone ]]> Wed, 16 Nov 2011 21:22:23 GMT